Quotes from Kevin J. Anderson

scars tell stories of who we are and what we did. A person without marks hasn't done anything.

The best place to start an adventure is with a quiet, perfect life … and someone who realizes that it can't possibly be enough.

When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer.

The best enemies are fabricated enemies for two reasons: one, we have nothing to worry about, and two, the populace falls in line.

I have a feeling we're mooning a mean junkyard dog, all brave and laughing - until the dog's leash breaks

Optimism is the best fertilizer.

My stories aren't for everyone—they were never meant to be—but

We have failed to see that total peace can be as deadly as total war.

The small room was furnished with little more than odd smells and disappointment.

That night the first frost of autumn struck Tucker's Grove. It crept up from the ground, snaring the fragile roots of plants. It emerged from the air, etching its signature on window-panes. A portent. The year was nearing its end. Things would die soon.

Trying to kill your own father, dueling with a clone of yourself, serving the Dark Side for the Emperor. If that's what it takes to be a powerful Jedi, maybe I don't want the job!

I've seen too many writers derail their creative process by stopping the action to tweak a word or a sentence. If you write a few paragraphs, then go back and polish them, you destroy all the forward momentum you had. It's like shifting gears—forward, reverse, forward, reverse. You could burn out your mental transmission. If you can train yourself to save the criticism for the second draft, you'll actually finish writing and have something to polish.

Luke smiled at his friend. "I seem to remember you called the Force a 'hokey religion' when I first met you." Han looked away, embarrassed. "Well, I've gotten smarter since then.

A man like Zod is effective primarily in crisis situations. And so in order to hold on to his power, he has to create or maintain the state of emergency.

Each life is the sum total of its moments.

Women died in childbirth, just as men did on the battlefield, and in both cases it was easier to convince the young and foolhardy to do it, to use them up before they were so old that their bodies refused to do what was necessary.

Well, I know that George Lucas doesn't like it at all. When I was working on The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, he told me that he would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and smashed.

A moment of consideration often prevents a thousand apologies

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.

Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them.